


Contact

by catty_the_spy



Series: #verse [6]
Category: Stargate: Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anxiety, Depression, Disturbing Themes, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 21:02:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/602038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catty_the_spy/pseuds/catty_the_spy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>I don’t want learning, or dignity, or respectability. I want this music and this dawn and the warmth of your cheek against mine.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Contact

“Greens and animal fat,” Becker said as he handed Young a plate. “Breakfast of champions.”

Young smiled. “Thanks.”

The mess was half empty. It’s early in the morning; most people were still asleep. Rush was working his way through his greens as if they’d personally offended him.

“Tonight’s movie night,” Young said, taking a bite of his food and wincing. He almost preferred tasteless protein. “Someone has the Matrix movies on their laptop.”

Rush looked up long enough to raise his eyebrows.

Young felt the vague beginnings of a smile. “I promised to see if you’d come.”

The look on Rush’s face showed what he thought of that.

“What are you in such a hurry to get to, anyway?”

“Aside from having no desire to prolong this…experience,” Rush snarled, stabbing at his plate, “I have several important adjustments to make to the starboard sensor array. I also have to work on the ship’s communication system and charging capacity, because the so-called science team is inept.”

“If that’s the case, what are they doing all the time?”

“Busy work.”

Young rolled his eyes. He wouldn’t call cataloguing areas of interest and making sure they had a workable food supply “busy work”, but he didn’t say so. It wasn’t as if Rush didn’t already know.

He carefully adjusted his grip on his fork.

“Are you going to do anything useful today?” Rush asked.

“I’m helping with the rope project when I’m finished on the bridge.”

It occurred to Young, as he took in Rush’s scowling face, that this was almost normal. Two people having a conversation over breakfast.

Except for the ancient alien spaceship. Except for the bizarre tasteless food. Except for the webbing between his fingers. Except for…

“What time does your shift start?”

Young blinked. “What?”

Rush’s face was annoyed, but his voice was soft. “Your bridge shift. When does it start?”

“Seven h-.”

“That’s three hours away. Why aren’t you asleep?”

Young shrugged. “You weren’t.”

 

“So help me Barris if you sing that fucking song one more time…”

“Richards.”

Richards subsided. Young gave him a long look before turning back to Greer. “You were saying?”

“I figure if we puree those tomatoes, find some salt somewhere, we could have ketchup. So since we’ll have bread, meat, lettuce, and ketchup we’ll have…?”

“A proper burger.” Young smiled. “Minus the cheese.”

“To be honest, sir, I can live without cheese.”

Young chuckled.

“You spin me right round, baby, right round…”

“Barris!”

“People!” Young hated raising his voice. “Richards, calm down. Barris…please pick another song.”

There was a brief moment of silence.

“In sleep he sang to me, in dreams he came…”

Young sighed. “You know, I actually preferred the other one.”

Greer laughed.

Hours later, Chloe looked up from her patchwork. “Are you humming ‘Phantom of the Opera’?”

Young blinked at her. “Possibly.”

“I love that! I didn’t know you’d ever seen it.”

Young smiled. “I haven’t.”

 

 

Camille’s knitting class was something of a refuge. It wasn’t entirely quiet, but it was peaceful enough. Everyone was focused on Camille’s demonstrations and their own projects. Camille was the only one with knitting needles, so the class shared. A couple of people used pens as a substitute, but most of the pens had been co-opted by other projects.

No one expected Young to do a lot of talking, and Camille didn’t mind if he lurked in the background with his computer and didn’t participate.

Today he had Chloe for company at the back of the room.

“Hey, about that next mission…”

“You’re not going,” Young said, before she could finish the question. “Rush needs your help.”

“Again?” Then she bit her lip. “Do you ever get the feeling that Dr. Rush knows something you don’t?”

Young blinked at her. “All the time.”

“Yeah.” She sighed. “Me too.”

 

Even the tea TJ gave him wasn’t doing anything for his headache. It might have been that that woke him, of the snarled edges of an unpleasant dream.

He blinked against the dim light, twisting to see that Rush was sitting up in the bed, using Young’s back as a table. He was draped over Rush’s lap.

“What time is it?”

“Stop moving,” Rush said in place of an answer, and shoved Young’s head down.

It took Young a moment to remember whose room they were in, and where he might have put his watch. Trying to reach out for it got him shoved again.

“Can’t you see I’m busy?”

“Actually no,” Young grumbled. “You’re writing on my back. What are you doing?”

“Go back to sleep, Young.”

“You-.”

“Everett. Go back to sleep.”

Young rolled his eyes but settled, folding his arms under his head. “Lotta work, Nick.”

Rush growled something in reply, but Young couldn’t make out more than a rumble.

 

“Why did anyone think The Matrix was a good idea?”

“Because we’ve seen Fellowship of the Ring fifty times?” Brody suggested.

“And the Wormhole X-Treme movie,” Park said. “And Gremlins.”

Eli sighed. “I never thought I could get tired of Gremlins, and yet….”

“How many movies do we have?” Young asked. The entire science team jumped.

“Uh…twenty?” Volker said. “I think.”

“Twenty-six,” Eli said. “Fellowship of the Ring, Gremlins, the Matrix movies, Wrath of Khan, Die Hard-”

“You don’t have to list them all,” Brody cut in.

“Don’t we have The Color Purple?”

“Yeah, but no one ever watches that except like…three people. It’s too depressing.”

“That movie is a classic!”’

“A depressing classic.”

Young glanced at the midair display. “Um….”

“Beggars can’t be choosers. Not everyone wants to watch Star Trek over and over again.”

“Is that supposed to be blinking?”

“Blinking?” Park asked.

“Um, no, that’s our water,” Eli said. The display flickered as Eli did something on his console. “Blinking is bad. That’s not supposed to be blinking. We have…a leak. We have a leak.”

Beneath the chorus of raised voices, Young pulled out his radio and sent someone down to investigate.

“We’ve repaired the damage, but not before we lost a third of our water.”

Young sighed. “Wonderful. Any idea what caused it?”

“Other than age? We’ve been gradually putting it under more strain. It would’ve happened sooner or later; fortunately for us, it didn’t leak until after we found the tools to repair it.”

“So it’s fixed.”

“Patched. We need to enact major repairs before it fails entirely.”

“One more thing to add to the list.”

Young spent two quiet hours helping to clean up the water that had leaked into several nearby corridors. There were only three people working with him; it wasn’t a big job.

One of them brought lunch for everyone – limp looking sandwiches and fruit mush.

When he was done with that, he found something else. There’s always something else.

He spent a week doing odd jobs in between bridge shifts and visits to the infirmary. It’s almost a relief when TJ lets him go planetside again.

He lived with the almost ever-present fear for capture, but it was nice to have the sun on his face, to see skies and clouds instead of emptiness and stars.

Chloe frequently volunteered for exploratory and gathering missions, but more often than not, Rush found something for her to do on the ship. Young helped Scott find flowers for her – she probably missed the sun too.

Some they used for tea, some they ate, others TJ spent hours working into her mystery mixtures for various ailments, and even the ones that weren’t useful were good for morale. It turned out okay.

 

On this planet, there were no flowers. The sky was a deep grey. The dull rocky landscape made everything blend together – the clouds might as well be rocks; the rocks might as well be clouds. The ground they walked on was soft. Ash.

It was impossible to know what happened here.

His team fanned out. Young stayed by the gate.

There were a few larger rocks nearby – not boulders, but large enough to be noticeable. He brushed one off, thinking about sitting, and paused when he saw the yellowish white color. It seemed strange in some place as grey as this. Or maybe not so strange – a skull. A vaguely humanoid skull buried beneath the ash, stripped of all identifying flesh. It could belong to anything.

After a moment he reburied it.

He sat in the shadow of the stargate, trying not to feel like he was sinking. He longed for wind, but there was no wind here.

Still as death. Appropriate.

He couldn’t even remember what they’d come searching for.

 

The next planet they visited was a hot rocky beach. There were long-beaked birds nesting in the heights of a cliff. They used the birds to find fish, and there was scrubby plant life not far from the gate.

Destiny came for a mineral in the rocks, but the crew spent a lot of time at the shore. Young found some relief in the salt water. It was as if ash had sunk into the pores of his hands. He’s washed his hands more than strictly necessary, but it seemed cleaner, somehow, to wash away the lingering death with something so full of life.

They don’t come away with much food, but they have a good bit of salt. It’s a good day, and Young’s hands were clean, for now.

 

Rush was…Rush was a bastard anywhere, but in bed he was a bizarre kind of poetry, discordant themes crashing together in a way that shouldn’t have been music, twisting around from disaster into something that was almost normal, almost right.

Rush’s hair was a sweaty tangled mess, spread haphazardly over the pillow. What they were doing was only kissing in the loosest since of the word, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was the friction, skin catching against skin as they rocked together, and maybe…maybe he was spending too much time around Rush. He was starting to sound like him.

As if he caught the thought – and maybe he had, Young was never quite sure – Rush dug his teeth into Young’s shoulder. It wasn’t enough to break the skin; Young almost wished it was.

He responded by digging his nails into Rush’s side. Rush hissed, a strange light in his eyes. His head went back just a little, and all Young could see was Rush’s skill, his entire dead skeleton, his mouth gaping open, stripped entirely of flesh, lost in a sea of grey ash.

The next thing he knew he was pressed flat against the wall. He forced himself to calm his breathing.

They stared at each other a long moment. He half expected Rush to make a biting comment, to get up and leave.

Rush sighed and sat up. “Oh sit down, will you?”

 

“Do you know what it is?” Young whispered into the back of Rush’s neck, waiting for sleep to catch him or some alarm to go off. He could feel the ash on his hands. Maybe he’d never be rid of it.

“Yes,” Rush said. He was stiff as a board. Young had thought that he was pretending to be asleep, but then…what was the use of pretending anymore?

“Will you tell me?”

Rush was silent for a long time. If Young hadn’t been pressed so close to him he might have assumed Rush was asleep for real. He clenched his right hand into the sheets in a slow rhythm – open and closed, and his knuckles brushed Rush’s stomach every time.

“It would be best,” Rush said carefully, “if you found that out yourself.”

Young frowned. “That’s a terrible idea. You-”

“Everett.” Rush stilled Young’s hand with one of his own, nails digging into his wrist. His hands were cold. “Don’t ask me about the things I know.”

Young flexed his wrist. “You won’t talk to me.”

“I tell you about the things that matter.”

Young grimaced at that lie. “But you won’t talk to me. You won’t talk to anyone.”

Rush rolled away from him. Young watched him where he lay, stiff as a board. He expected a verbal attack, but that wasn’t what he got.

“When I touch you, I know everything. I know when you first cheated on your wife, what you ate for dinner, when you broke your first bone, and every single fucking detail of your current existence. With prolonged contact I can feel your lifespan alter, and this is true of every person I touch.” Rush sat up, one hand on his neck. “If necessary, I could probably replicate your genetic code from memory.”

Young slowly sat up too. “You can do this with everything?”

“Everything with circuits.”

The silence stretched for a long moment. Young sighed. “What else?”

“What makes you think there’s something else?”

“Because I know you,” he said. “Not as well as you know me, but well enough.”

Rush huffed a laugh. Young didn’t have to look to know he was smiling that damn smile of his.

That smile was made for broken things. It fit Rush perfectly.

“You should get some sleep, Everett.”

Then he left to vanish into the depths of the ship. Young wondered whether he’d see him at all the rest of the day; it was always hard to tell.

He ran a hand over his face. “Shit.”

 

   
The longer Young stayed on Destiny, the more convinced he was that it was labyrinth. There was two of pretty much everything, laid out in a pattern that made sense only to the Ancients, full of dead ends and empty rooms with no discernible purpose. A trap.

It probably wasn’t the healthiest way of seeing it, but who was healthy anymore? Certainly not the man who’d sprouted webbed fingers.

Rush could feel him dying. Fuck.

The thought stopped Young in his tracks. He and Rush touched all the time. They slept crushed together. How could Rush live with that?

Young glanced at his watch, then at the dull grey corridor that surrounded him.

He should head to the control room. He was supposed to meet with the science team. Rush wouldn’t be there – he never was – but now Young was beginning to understand.

His head ached. Nothing new.

 

“So we’re thinking that one of these rooms might lead to an intact water tank.”

“But you’re not sure?”

Eli shrugged a shoulder. “Well, it’s impossible to be completely sure. There are an awful lot of tanks on this ship; we don’t even know what half of them are for. However, we can be reasonably certain that at least one of those tanks is meant to hold water.”

“We just don’t know which one.”

“Yet,” Eli added, shooting Volker a grimace. “We don’t know which one yet. Which is why this would be the perfect time to do a little more exploring. We’re going to be in FTL for another week; that’s plenty of time to get a few teams to each of these places, and make any repairs to our new water tank when we find it.”

“And even if it turns out it’s destroyed we can scavenge it for parts,” Park said. “So either way it’s a good idea.”

“You don’t have to try so hard to convince me,” Young said. “I was going to agree.”

“Oh.”

“Talk to Camille, set up your teams. I want to know how many people are going to be involved and how they’re going to get there. You have until,” he checked his watch, “thirteen hundred hours to come up with the details.”

He debated hiding in his quarters until then, but decided to visit the infirmary instead. It’d keep TJ from hunting him down later, and he could get something for his headache. .

He made sure to pull himself together on the way. He hated making her worry.

 

James flinched away from the cloth TJ pressed against the cut on her face.

“This’ll sting a bit,” TJ murmured.

James scowled. “I noticed. What is that, anyway?”

TJ looked at the old water bottle sticking half out of her med kit. “…You don’t wanna know.”

The face James made showed that that wasn’t exactly reassuring.

“We’re in corridor C-12,” Young said into his radio, dabbing at his own cuts. “Make sure team five knows that B-11 is out.”

“Keep going if you can,” Eli said. “We’ll get you a new exit route.”

His team was okay – cuts and scrapes. Once TJ was done, he signaled them to move on.

“Oh look, doors,” James said a short while later. C-23 was wider than the ones before it, lined with doors on either side.

“Is this our stop?” James said into her radio.

“You’re five corridors too early,” Eli said. There was a brief pause while Eli switched to their kino feed. “Are you sure you went the right way?”

“Unless there was something wrong with your directions….”

Young walked the perimeter of the room, half heartedly looking for some sort of hint.

“This is team three,” can Scott’s voice over the radio. “I think we found a laundry room.”

“Team four this is Eli. Power seems good; I say open a few doors and see what you find. Try not to flip any switches. Team three, you found what?”

Young tuned out the radio chatter and opened one of the doors. The room behind it was lined with shelves. He stepped in and the room lit up with a blue glow.

“It’s storage,” he said.

James opened another door. “Same here; I think this one might be refrigerated.”

Most of the storage rooms were empty. One was filled with components Young’s team had no hope or identifying. Another was – oddly enough – full of bedding.

“I think we just discovered where our poop goes,” said one of the civilian scientists. Various sounds of disgust were audible in the background.

“Michealis, you’re supposed to say what team you’re on.”

“Oh! Um…two?”

“Team two didn’t find the waste management system,” Barnes cut in. “That’s team one. Team two is still en route.”

“This is team four,” James said into her radio. “We found a storage area in C-23.”

“Noted,” Chloe said. “Eli’s gone to check on team three. Make sure you label it before you move on.”

 

Team five was the one that ended up finding the tank, but people were more enamored with team three’s find.

“We don’t even know if half this stuff works,” Eli said, “but we could hang our lines from these hooks.” Eli pointed to the series of hooks on either wall. “I think maybe they were for hangers or something. Did the Ancients even have hangers? Anyway, we were thinking: laundry on this side, and then we can use these for our wool cleaning? I mean, we’re never going to need this much laundry space, and we could use the room for dying and these would be useful for doing larger batches of-”

“Okay.”

“…cool.” Eli frowned. “Are you feeling okay? You aren’t getting sick again, are you?”

Young sighed. “I’m fine, Eli. Is there anything else?”

“Uh, not really. Well, there’s still the matter of scoping the new water tank and seeing if it will hold up to constant use, but we should probably check with Rush first.”

“Then find me after you’ve talked to him. Anything we can deal with right now?”

“No. That is…uh…no.”

Young looked at the mess of people poking at wires and peering in holes. “Keep me posted,” he said. Then he went to find a quiet place to work.

The habitable area was growing a little every day, but most people kept to the same places; it made it easy to find a quiet room with little risk of suffocation. If they could find a functioning seed ship there was a chance they’d get the materials to rebuild the dome and potentially make some glassware. The odds of them meeting another seed ship weren’t likely, but life on Destiny was all about back-up plans. It wasn’t likely they’d meet an alternate version of their own ship or their descendants from the past, either, but they had. Something about Destiny threw the odds out the window.

For now, Young found one of the many workrooms littered about the ship and set up shop. The paper was lumpy and uneven, and the “pencil” left black smudges on the tips of his fingers, but it was fine. It was fine.

He was fine.

Upon entering the mess, Young was presented with half a deck of cards. His eyebrows shot up.

“Tonight’s game night,” Eli said.

Young presumed that was supposed to be an explanation. “And you’re giving these to me because…?”

“We were hoping you could be game master.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“The Recreation Committee. Ah…me and Chloe. We’ll, really we’re the Recreation and Morale Committee, but that’s a bit of a mouthful. Camille approved it while you were in the infirmary; Lisa’s going to join too but she’s been a bit busy with the plants. Actually, it was her decision to make you game master because Chloe and I were having a hard time-”

Young help up a hand to stem the flow of talk. “I actually hadn’t planned on attending.”

“Oh.” Eli frowned. “You don’t have to be game master tonight. TJ was our second choice and Hernandez is pretty strict when it comes to poker.”

Young handed Eli the deck. “Have you seen Rush?”

Eli sighed. “No; he’s been sending us snippy messages through the consoles. Usually he’s at least a jerk over the radio.”

“I’ll talk to him.” Later. He’d talk to him later. For now, he was handing himself over to the mercy of Becker’s cooking skills.

Rush was…sometimes it was better to leave Rush alone when he didn’t want to be found.

 

It always felt strange to sleep on Destiny. The sheets weren’t anything he’d felt on earth, for one, and the beds were…odd. Oddly shaped, oddly scented, and they felt weird to lie on. He preferred sleeping on the ground.

It was Rush that woke him up, slipping into bed at some odd hour of the night – whatever passed for night here. It wasn’t the first time Rush had gone and come back in the night; it wouldn’t be the last.

“Where do you go?” Young asked. He watched Rush through slitted eyes. FTL only provided so much light; it wasn’t worth straining to see more than the shape of Rush’s back. Even like this, he could see the weary stiffness about him, the way he stared at the floor, the muscles of his back and neck clenched tight.

“If everybody minded their own business,” Rush said without looking up, “the world would go round a deal faster than it does.”

“Which would not be an advantage, seeing as we’re on a spaceship.” Young’s smile turned into a yawn. “Alice in Wonderland, huh?”

“Gloria was fond of it,” Rush said after a moment’s hesitation. “I preferred Through the Looking Glass.”

“She liked to read?”

“Her taste in books was almost uniformly terrible, but there were a few exceptions.”

“I guess we have that in common.”

Rush made a vague noise.

Mostly he just wanted to understand. What made Rush tick? Why was Rush several drummers short of a marching band? What did Rush want, really, from this mission they won’t live to see the end of?

Rush knew everything about him, down to the tiniest shift of his body temperature. Young just wanted to know him in return.

“You should get some sleep,” Young said, rather than asking any of his questions now. He means “Stay”, but sometimes it’s easier not to say what you mean.

It was a long moment before Rush lied down. He was on the other side of the bed, staring up at the ceiling. Young grabbed his hand, squeezed, It’s okay.

Rush sighed. No, not really.

**Author's Note:**

> Summary quotes one of Rumi’s poems, translated by Coleman Barks. For the h/c bingo prompt “depression” Follows "Swimming in Molasses".


End file.
